In May of last year, I attended the 30th anniversary screening of Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987) at the British Film Institute in London. The film is adapted from two plays by Andrea Dunbar and follows two schoolgirls from a rundown, Bradford council estate, as they embark on a sexual relationship with an older, married man. With the tagline, ‘Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down’, it’s not surprising that Clarke’s film divided opinion when it premiered.
While some saw a defiant, irreverent depiction of a contemporary working class community, others complained that it was crude, sensationalist and unrealistic. The audience at the anniversary screening were clearly from the former camp. The atmosphere in the packed-out cinema was celebratory: people laughed throughout and clapped rapturously as the credits rolled. And the members of the cast and crew who took part in the panel discussion afterwards seemed delighted to be there.
And yet, as I sat on the bus home that night, I felt uneasy. A couple of weeks earlier, I had rewatched the film alone, on my laptop. I had not felt like laughing then. There were a lot of things I liked about the film, including the relationship between Rita and Sue (portrayed brilliantly by Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes), and the way in which these protagonists are determined to squeeze all of the fun they can out of life, in spite of everything and everyone. But I felt uncomfortable with another aspect: namely the predatory nature of Bob’s seduction – if we can call it that – of the girls, and the way this seems to be passed off as a joke in the film. Why was the problematic relationship at the heart of Rita, Sue and Bob Too seen as being acceptable, and even amusing, in the eighties? And why were we still laughing along in 2017?
Now, it seems, the laughter might have finally stopped. In December, the Royal Court cancelled its production of Rita, Sue and Bob Too, in light of allegations concerning its original co-director, Max Stafford-Clark – and following a Day of Action organised by the theatre’s current artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, in response to the Weinstein scandal. In a statement, the Royal Court and the Out of Joint theatre company explained: “On our stage we recently heard 150 stories of sexual harassment and abuse and therefore the staging of this work, with its themes of grooming and abuses of power on young women, on that same stage now feels highly conflictual.” The decision was quickly reversed following outcry in the press and social media, but the whole affair will undoubtedly change the way the play – on which Clarke’s film is largely based – is viewed. Those themes were always there, plain for all to see. Only now, it seems, are we actually seeing them. If she were around today, what would Dunbar make of it all?
It’s notable that in documentaries, news reports and photographs from the time, Dunbar always seems to be framed by a scuffed brick wall, or a dingy stairwell.
Stafford-Clark ‘discovered’ Dunbar in 1980, when he was artistic director of the Royal Court. She was 19 at the time, pregnant, living in a refuge for ‘battered women’, and had decided to enter a play she had written when she was 15 into a national writing competition organised by the theatre. The Arbor – a play named after Dunbar’s own street – was staged later that year. “A full-length version of The Arbor existed in my head,” Stafford-Clark later commented, “but I wasn’t altogether certain the same play occupied Andrea’s thoughts.” Dunbar’s debut was a success, with the dramatist and screenwriter Shelagh Delaney (herself a working glass prodigy from ‘the North’) describing her as “a genius straight from the slums with black teeth and a brilliant smile”. Delaney was using her own artistic license here: Dunbar did not have black teeth, or a particularly brilliant smile. She did, however, have scars on her face from when she fell (or was pushed) through a glass door, strawberry blonde hair, worried eyes and a stubborn jaw.
In any case, the tagline stuck, and understandably so. Dunbar had never even set foot in a theatre when she wrote her first play; her raw talent came as a surprise to her as much as everybody else. “I stumbled across it by accident,” she explained. “I didn’t actually know I could write, nor did I know I ever would.” And so she was hailed as a kind of miracle, or anomaly. The trouble with this idea, as Dunbar herself pointed out, is that it underplays the likelihood that there have always been innumerable “geniuses” in the “slums”, though few of them ever been discovered. “Other people haven’t had the opportunity,” she noted.
Dunbar is woefully underappreciated, though interest in her has been growing again recently, with the rerelease of Rita, Sue and Bob Too on DVD, the (fraught) restaging of her play, and the publication of Adelle Stripe’s, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile (2017), a novel based on the playwright’s life. During her lifetime, she was known for writing about her own experiences, which included teenage pregnancy, poverty, domestic abuse and alcoholism. Her honesty made her reputation, but it also made her life even harder.
Framed this way, sexual licentiousness is subtly – probably unintentionally – connected to being young, female and working class
Throughout her short career, Dunbar was forced to defend her work against hostile critics, and some of her own neighbours, who were angry at the notoriety that Rita, Sue and Bob Too brought to their estate (the Bradford Tourist Board even waded in, accusing the film of painting a “slummy, fake” picture of the city). In a BBC Arena documentary broadcast in 1980, Dunbar insisted, forcefully: “I’ve got to see it as I want to see it and not as they see it. My view, not their view.”
It’s notable that in documentaries, news reports and photographs from the time, Dunbar always seems to be framed by a scuffed brick wall, or a dingy stairwell. Or else she’s drinking in a pub, or pushing a pram. This is not how other playwrights, artists or intellectuals usually tend to be shown (although there have been rare exceptions such as Delaney, herself a working class ‘prodigy’, often shown walking among the soot-stained terraces of Salford). Though well meaning, there was undoubtedly a kind of othering going on here. The other being the northern, the poor, the young, the female. It’s as though Dunbar could only be understood within this specific context. Rather than being about her life, Dunbar’s work came to be seen as a commentary about working class life in general.
Dunbar’s modest fame peaked with the film version of Rita, Sue and Bob Too. Over the years, it has acquired the status of a cult classic, not least because of the way it bucked the trend for cinema featuring working class characters. Tired of seeing depressing social realist films about how grim it was ‘up north’, Clarke wanted to make an upbeat, light-hearted alternative. As I discovered during the panel discussion after the BFI screening, many of the characters and extras in Clarke’s film were played by residents of the Buttershaw – the council estate where the film was shot and where Dunbar lived almost all her life – and many of them were involved in the local working men’s club comedy circuit. This, in part, accounts for the peculiar, bawdy tone of the film. There are scenes in which the locals make cameo-like appearances – such as one towards the end where Bob’s wife (Lesley Sharp) confronts Rita and Sue outside Sue’s house. An old man with a combover (Danny O’Dea, a ‘funnyman’ with a background in music hall theatre), performs a kind of comedy skit commentary from his overlooking balcony, bobbing his knees and shouting things like: “Send ‘em on Manningham Lane [the red light district in Bradford]. It’s the best place for ‘em!”
Dunbar was quick-witted and deadpan, and the plays from which she derived the film’s screenplay – The Arbor (1980) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) – are full of her dry sense of humour. But this humour is of a different, quieter sort than that found in the film itself. The difference is perceptible in a notorious scene that features in both the original version of Rita, Sue and Bob Too and the film: Bob (George Costigan) drives the girls home, taking a detour over the Yorkshire Moors to have sex with them in his car, one after the other. In this scene, the dialogue in the film is lifted directly from the play.
Bob: Are you both a virgin?
Sue: What do you want to know for?
Bob: Just curious, that’s all. Well are you?
Rita: You’re nosy aren’t you?
Bob” Nosy no. Curious yes. I often wonder what young lasses get up to nowadays.
Sue: Well that’s not much. ‘Cause there’s never nowt to do around here.
Bob: You haven’t answered my question. Are you or not?
Rita: Yes, we both are.
Bob: Oh.
When reading these lines, Bob comes across as creepy and coercive. Rita and Sue respond sassily, but their sass could well be a strategy for masking uncertainty and fear, as much as amusement, or excitement. The (written) play leaves room for these ambiguities but the film makes its own call. As the above exchange is volleyed between the threesome, the camera switches back and forth from Bob’s amused eyes in the rear view mirror, to the knowing smirks that pass between Rita and Sue. It’s all a joke, the eyes are saying. The scene descends into slapstick, as Bob struggles to arrange the girls’ limbs on his reclining car seat. In the dark of the cinema at the BFI, the audience roared with laughter.
In the play, Rita winds up having a baby and marrying Bob. Her friendship with Sue falls apart, though she names her daughter after her. At the very end, Sue’s mother and Bob’s ex wife come together in solidarity, the former declaring: “All fellas do the dirty on you sometime or other. Only let them come on your conditions and stick to them. Don’t let them mess you around.” But the film ends differently – with a kind of punch line, though it is unclear whom the joke’s on. In the final scene, Bob literally jumps back into bed with both Rita and Sue.
What did Dunbar make of Clarke’s adaptation? She wrote the script, and in the discussion at the BFI, the members of the panel described how she was on-set everyday (she lived there, after all), providing directions and throwing in the odd bit of improvised dialogue when called upon. They gave the impression that the playwright was an integral part of the filming process, despite being intimidatingly “hard, tough” and down the pub every evening. Yet, according to Stafford-Clark, she was unhappy with the way the film turned out. Writing in 2000, he recounted that when Dunbar saw how the film ended she commented: “That would never have happened.” In light of the revelations about Stafford-Clark, you have to wonder whether Dunbar felt similarly uncomfortable with how her plays turned out under his supervision (“It weren’t so funny when it was happening,” she’s said to have protested during a rehearsal for The Arbor.) It’s tragedy that’s she’s not around to tell us.
Dunbar only went on to write one further work after Rita, Sue and Bob Too – Shirley, about a mother and daughter relationship. She died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990, aged just 29. Having complained of headaches for weeks, she collapsed in her local pub and could not be revived. She left behind three children – Lorraine, Lisa and Andrew – and a couple of plastic bags worth of unfinished work: the beginnings of a novel adaptation and an outline for another play.
Clarke – like Stafford-Clark before him, and several others after – had been fascinated by Dunbar, and saw her work as an opportunity to make his own broader points about the state of society. And perhaps because he was eager to avoid censoriousness, condescension or moral judgment – and perhaps because he didn’t want to make another film about social problems, per se – he seems to have gone out of his way to show how free from any sense of shame Rita and Sue are, and how they enjoy “shagging” as much as Bob does. Bob’s upwardly mobile wife, on the other hand, is pitted against the girls, subtly mocked for being cold and frigid, only willing to have sex with the lights off. Framed this way, sexual licentiousness is subtly – probably unintentionally – connected to being young, female and working class.
In one particularly troubling scene in Clarke’s film, Bob appears on a hill overlooking the school grounds, where Rita and Sue are playing tennis in their white PE kits, flashing their knickers. We, the viewer, are encouraged to laugh along as the girls desperately try to get out of their lesson so that they can go “for a drive” with Bob. It’s a disturbing scenario, presented to us as farce. In the panel discussion after the BFI screening, my friend asked George Costigan what he thought the audience was laughing at, when they watched the film. “What are you laughing at?” Costigan countered. Among the panel, there seemed to be a consensus that the laughter in the film was ‘real’ and that the humour was ‘of the time’.
Clearly, we have to appreciate that things were different in the eighties. Is it wrong to condemn the film – and the play – from a contemporary (post Saville, Operation Yew Tree, and more recently Weinstein) perspective, for the casual sexism – not to mention racism – that appears in it? It would be unfair to suggest that the attitudes displayed by some of the characters were shared or condoned by Clarke. That would be a deliberate misreading of his intentions. And yet the film undoubtedly encourages us to laugh such attitudes off. And the fact that audiences are still laughing – until very recently, at least – leads me to question how much things have really changed.
Shortly after I watched Rita, Sue and Bob Too, the BBC drama Three Girls was broadcast. Written by Nicole Taylor and directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, this harrowing drama tells the true story of how young, working class girls in Rochdale were systematically sexually exploited by a network of older, mostly Asian, men between 2008 and 2012. Based on the testimonies of the victims, Three Girls refutes the rumours – still pervasive to this day – that the police were unwilling to intervene because they were afraid of being accused of racism. Rather it shows how the police did nothing – despite the sexual health worker Sara Rowbotham, played superbly by Maxine Peake, repeatedly reporting the crime – because of an ingrained belief that the girls were implicated in their own grooming, that they were somehow ‘asking for it’. Owing to their social status and their ‘difficult’ behaviour, they did not fit the accepted ideal of innocent ‘victims’.
Watching Three Girls, a scene in particular struck me: one of the girls, Holly, is cross-examined in court, via video link. She responds to the first question by nodding her head, and the judge intervenes to tell her: “Rather than gestures, Holly, you’ll have to speak words.” Ironically, her words are then twisted and used against her by the defence team. Reading her original police statements back to her, verbatim, the lawyers emphasise the “likes” that pepper her speech, subtly mocking her, and undermining her authority. She tries to explain why she didn’t fight back when she was raped: “I was trying to say no in, like, a giggly way, because I didn’t want to say it in a stern way, because I didn’t want to offend him. And I was scared. Cos if I said it, like, nastily to him, I didn’t know what he would do, so I…” At this point a look crosses her face, as she realises how this must sound to the people in the courtroom.
What this scene highlights is the absurdity, the danger, of taking words – and giggling – at face value without really trying to understand, to empathise, with the speaker, and what they really mean. At the same time, it brings to the fore the common misconception that consent is simply a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I mention it here, in connection to Rita, Sue and Bob Too, because I think it’s important to remember that Rita and Sue are schoolchildren and Bob is an adult. And it’s equally important to remember that there has long been, and still is to this day, a pervasive belief that working class girls are more ‘up for it’, more sexually available than their middle class counterparts.
It’s rare to come across Dunbar’s work in ‘unmediated’ form; other people have used it – and Dunbar herself – as source material for plays, films and books – Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too being just one example. Invariably and unavoidably, these writers and filmmakers have brought their own preconceptions about working-class people – and specifically working-class women – into the equation. Clio Barnard’s 2010 film, The Arbor, is intriguing in that it addresses this problem. By mixing documentary and drama, the real and the invented, Barnard draws attention to her own part in the making and remaking of Dunbar’s legend.
Barnard – who is, like Dunbar, from Bradford, albeit from a very different background – wanted to bring the playwright’s story back into the public consciousness. But her film is no straightforward biopic. She devised an unusual technique: she had actors lip-sync to recorded interviews with Dunbar’s friends and family, the result being something halfway between talking heads interviews and dramatic performances. The effect is disorientating at first. You become conscious of the artifice of the film – that what you are seeing is staged, and not ‘reality’. And at the same time you are prevented from making any unconscious class-based judgments of the speakers based on their appearances. In using this technique, Barnard paid homage to A State Affair – a play by Out of Joint, who returned to the Buttershaw Estate in 2000 and used interviews with residents as verbatim dialogue. Interestingly, she also unwittingly anticipated Three Girls, which used real police interviews and court recordings as dialogue, to add ‘authenticity’, but also to blur the line between fact and fiction.
In Barnard’s lip-synced interviews, the people who knew Dunbar describe their memories of her, giving slightly differing accounts of the same incidents from her past – such as how a house fire started – and conflicting judgments of her character. Her youngest daughter, Lisa (played by Christine Bottomley), is more forgiving. She remembers her mother shutting herself away in her room, trying to write – but also being doing her best to care for her children. Lorraine, on the other hand (played by Manjinder Virk) remembers things very differently. Being mixed race (her father is Pakistani), she felt like an outsider in her community and experienced constant, casual racism. It becomes clear that for a long time, Lorraine has blamed her mother for not protecting or loving her enough. “I think part of it is because she does miss her,” Lisa speculates. “But she’s got a mad way of showing it.”
Lorraine is articulate and, so it appears, painfully honest. Her story is harrowing, and over the course of the film, it begins to overshadow all of the others, painting a fairly dark picture of Dunbar as an alcoholic, neglectful mother. Intermittently, however, the interviews are intercut with documentary footage from the 1980s, and the contrast between this grainy, bleached archive material and the sharp contemporary camerawork comes as a jolt; as does seeing the and hearing the ‘real’ Andrea Dunbar. It is a reminder that she is no longer around to tell her side of the story; that her story has been retold and rewritten by others ever since she first put pen to paper.
The film ends with some footage of Dunbar catching a train with Lorraine when she was a baby. Dunbar is still just a teenager herself, and in the voiceover she talks about having kids when you’re young. “Sometimes you wish you hadn’t ‘cos you wanted to do this and that,’ she says, ‘but when you’ve actually got them, if they were taken away from you you’d soon miss ‘em and want ‘em back… Maybe it’s just Lorraine because she’s a good baby, I don’t know.” She wipes her sleeve on the glass to clear away the condensation, and together she and Lorraine look at something out of the window, beyond the view of the camera.
Anna Coatman is a writer and editor from Leeds, now based in London. Having previously been Visual Culture Editor at I.B.Tauris, she is now Deputy Editor at RA Magazine, as well as Editorial Director at 3 of Cups Press.
